Here at Siege Media, link building is one of our main strategies for helping clients gain traffic not only to specific content, but to their website as a whole.

Google has written and tweeted about the importance of generating inbound links to your website. It helps drive referral traffic to your site and more importantly, it helps tell Google that your site is valued, raising your Domain Authority.

Our view on content is essentially this take on a common old saying: If a great piece of content is created on your site, but no one sees it, does it really exist?

In Google’s eyes, it basically does not. If no one is linking to your site, it’s as if your content is created in a vacuum.

So, the way we get Google (and the rest of world) to see our client’s content and link to it is by pulling up our sleeves and doing some old fashioned outreach. We email hundreds of prospective bloggers, journalists and website owners that might enjoy the content and ask them to link to it.

That is where content promotion with BuzzStream comes in.

Personalized Mailing at Scale

In the early days, we relied on countless Google Sheets, each manually updated, to keep track of our outreach. BuzzStream allows us to take this headache out of the equation and powers our team members to manage these outreach emails as if they were clients in a sales funnel.

Sending about 100+ emails for every project can be a handful for anyone to track in one project, let alone five or ten per month going at the same time. Having the ability to track opens, clicks, and even responses right in BuzzStream automatically saves the headache of manual data input as well as the potential for error.

But, where you really begin to find the value is through building relationships with journalists and bloggers.

Personalizing to Build Relationships with Bloggers and Journalists

Since we focus so heavily on outreach, personalizing emails is key to building relationships with journalists and bloggers. If we were to send a mass email out to all of our prospect lists, our link rate would sit at just about zero percent. So, we look to BuzzStream to help us do this in a cost effective manner.

The Dynamic Fields option helps bring in information like Website Name and First Name, or even create our own custom fields.

Having the ability to email in real time while prospecting with BuzzMarker gives our team the ability to refer to information on a page, without having to open a new window or tab. (If you’ve ever tried to do this type of work without a dual-monitor setup, the BuzzMarker is a true game changer.)

The time that we save going back and forth between spreadsheets and web pages allows us to dig deeper when personalizing an email for a prospect. This helps establish a real connection with the person we are emailing, which helps us continue to foster these relationships.

We’ve sent tens of thousands of outreach emails and greatly attribute our high link success rate to this ease of use.

For an agency with 50+ employees, each sending out 100+ emails in each campaign, the more relationships we have, the bigger and better our overall agency prospect pool becomes.

Teaming Up At the Agency Level to Foster Relationships

When prospecting, we can see who has already linked to similar projects. These are people that we know are more apt to share a link to our project. This eliminates precious hours spent trying to find relevant blogs for specific verticals.

It also greatly improves our success rate. Instead of a cold email, we can send something like this:

This allows us to continue to build relationships with journalists or bloggers who are consistently looking for interesting/unique content.

The ‘History’ feature in BuzzStream lets us easily see who else has reached out to a particular prospect and, more importantly, what was already said in an email. If we see that an email has been sent, but hasn’t gotten a response, we can tweak the email copy moving forward. We can also check to see which journalist or blogger was emailed.

Sometimes a second team member will dig into the site closer and find an even more relevant contact, increasing our trust with that contact. If there is one thing journalists hate is if they are getting pitched something that isn’t in their “beat”.

For instance, one of our newer team members wasn’t getting any traction or response from Inc.com for one project. Another team member quickly realized that the email being used previously was just a general pitch email.

From here, the other team member was able to troubleshoot without even consulting the other members. She then dove back in and found a personal email for the journalist.

Another thing they hate is being pitched to too much. Sometimes enough is enough. By seeing how many times a prospect has been pitched without any response, we can easily gauge if it’s time to move on.

Using Relationships to Draw Insights at an Agency Level

Taking a look at a more macro level, BuzzStream helps us work together to draw insights.

For example, when analyzing the performance of our outreach we uncovered insights like optimal subject line length or even best performing topics in a given industry. We can also look what type of content is doing well, and where we have the stronger relationships with bloggers or journalists.

For example, if we find that we are producing content for an business technology site that gets a lot of links from HR blogs, we may continue to brainstorm ideas in that HR vertical.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that when building an agency, you need to think about how you can be as efficient as possible in all avenues. BuzzStream has made it easy for us to bake software right into our workflow and has become an essential tool in our value as an agency. The user-friendly interface makes it easy to onboard new hires, saving us valuable time and money.

Every link we earn is a new relationship, data insight, and proof of concept for future ideas. After almost four years with BuzzStream, it has become a tool that we can’t live without.

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About the Author

Vince is a Content Marketing Manager at Siege Media in sunny San Diego, California. He supports the team with SEO and content strategies. He is fascinated by the way people behave online and the types of content they consume.
Outside of work, you can catch Vince running, walking his dog, playing his saxophone, watching baseball, and discovering a new favorite beer at one of San Diego’s many craft breweries.

Disclaimer: This is a guest post. The author's views are entirely his or her own, and don't necessarily reflect the opinions of BuzzStream.